Stanley Kubrick

"To establish a good working relationship [with an actor] I think all the actor has to know is that you respect his talent enough to want him in your film."

His life and early days

Date of Birth: 26 July 1928, New York City, USA

Date of Death: 7 March 1999, England UK

Stanley Kubrick was born in New York, and was considered intelligent despite poor grades at school. Hoping that a change of scenery would produce better academic performance, Kubrick's father Jack (a physician) sent him in 1940 to Pasadena, California. Hoping to find something to interest his son, Jack introduced Stanley to chess, with the desired result. Chess would become an important device for Kubrick in later years, often as a tool for dealing with recalcitrant actors, but also as an artistic motif in his films.

Jack Kubrick's decision to give his son a camera for his thirteenth birthday would be an even wider move: Kubrick became an avid photographer, and would often make trips around New York taking photographs which he would develop in a friend's darkroom. After selling an unsolicited photograph to Look Magazine, Kubrick began to associate with their staff photographers, and at the age of seventeen was offered a job as an apprentice photographer. In the next few years, Kubrick had regular assignments and would become a voracious movie-goer.

Discovering Kubrickism

Stanley Kubrick mixed his leadership style and his approach to the challenge of balancing the need for artistic control with the need to involve others in the creative process. The directorial approach discussed is defined as ‘Kubrickism’, from his sensibilities as a writer to his demand for perfection as a director.

Kubrick was known and described as perfectionist, incredibly detailed, controller, obsessive, confidential, imperturbable, focused and very creative. Some would say “difficult and remote”; others would say “brilliant, bold, and daring but an absolute control freak”.

Perfectionism earned a reputation for hard man and megalomaniac. He was considered a mythical character, seen as a paranoid genius with a very pessimistic view of human nature.

Despite his prickly, impersonal, even shy, demanding and difficult reputation, no one can doubt the man had a rich talent for realizing cinema as a grand, sensory spectacle that wasn´t afraid to take risks and was universally respected.

What makes film directed by Stanley Kubrick a Stanley Kubrick's movie?

Kubrick was completely fearless as filmmaker: It takes guts and determination to make it in the film industry. Kubrick possessed these traits and calculated every intricate move like a game of chess (of which he was a master). If he did possess fears he refused to show them.

His visual style is recognized the world over — inspiring generations of filmmakers to take risks in composition and staging, pushing the boundaries of the art form.

Working in a vast range of styles from dark comedy to horror to crime to drama, Kubrick was an enigma, living and creating in almost total seclusion, far away from the watchful eye of the media. His films were a reflection of his obsessive nature, perfectionist masterpieces that remain among the most thoughtful and visionary motion pictures ever made.

Kubrick uses several cinematic techniques in his films, including his one-point perspective shots that lean on symmetry and vanishing graphic vectors to give them their aesthetic edge.

On a technical level, we see his hallmarks, like his use of extreme camera angles and close-ups, long tracking shots, and wide-angle lenses. But the way Kubrick manages to make these techniques work on an emotional level, however, is what makes him a master filmmaker.